www.bank-holidays.com keeps a list of the days when banks are closed in over 750 countries and regions.

You can imagine just how enormous this task is when you learn that in Switzerland, for example, each canton has its own set of dates, or that a football match can cause a government to proclaim a public holiday with immediate effect (such as Cameroon's Ol The job gets even more complicated when you consider that certain Buddhist or Muslim festivals fall on seemingly random dates depending on local physical observations!

And of course, in unstable political situations, there are often spectacular about-turns, when for example it turns out that a certain holiday was in honour of the newly deposed president.

Religious data, but also event-related data

The site also informs you of events which for their own particular reason bring economic activity to a standstill: general strikes, elections, eclipses, and many other factors.

Feeding the database Since 1998, the database has been put together with a great deal of patience by the team from EDIT (Easy Does I.T.), an online translation company who have been active since 1993.

A forest of data has been gone through with a fine toothcomb. Now, however, the site's numerous visitors enable us to respond in real time by bringing errors to our attention. Bankers, for example, sometimes protest that their business is open and you'd b

The site currently has an inventory of 60,000 dates from now till the year 2070.